Modern Family’s Sofia Vergara: Gloria “might be a stereotype, but I think the character is fantastic”

Sofia Vergara, who plays Gloria on ABC’s hit comedy Modern Family, doesn’t really object to her portrayal of a typical Latina.

“I don’t know why people think stereotypes are so terrible,” she admitted to Yahoo! “I am Gloria, my mother is Gloria, my aunts are Gloria. I mean, it’s not like I’m putting on a fake bra with big prosthetics, you know. It might be a stereotype, but I think the character is fantastic. She’s colorful, she’s honest, she’s out there, she cares about people. She’s loud, but I am loud. She’s crazy, but I am crazy. It’s not a problem.”

She was cast in the role by creators Steve Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, and they ended up forming the role to fit Vergara’s personality. “They had meetings with me at the beginning and they would ask me things, because the character has a lot of similarities with my real life. I am an immigrant in this country, I have an accent, I’m Colombian. I have a child from a previous marriage. So it was created around me. But now they have Google so they don’t really need to ask me, ‘What is a Colombian dish or a Colombian hat?’ They just go and Google it.”

Despite the stellar cast that makes up the show’s crazy characters, Vergara was initially concerned that Gloria wouldn’t be well-received. “I was worried, because I thought nobody was going to like a hot-looking Latin woman married to the older guy,” she said. “It was totally like the description of the gold-digger. But after we shot the pilot, I realized that I had chemistry with Ed. I think everybody completely believed that Gloria and Jay belong together.”

Vergara wasn’t always sure she was going to be a television star. “I really had no interest in being an actress,” she admitted. “But I wanted to see what happened. I got the part [in a movie called Big Trouble in 2001] and I liked it and said, ‘Maybe I can do this. I’ll stay here six months, one year, and see what happens.’ Twelve years later, I haven’t left.”

Her fame with the Emmy-winning show still has her feeling a little surprised. “I don’t know what I’m doing, definitely,” she said. “I knew I could be funny, because I was always making my friends laugh. But I didn’t think I was going to be in a super-successful sitcom being funny.”